Photoshop or PSP?

What are people using in the digital darkroom? There appears to be a quite a few Photoshop users on the forum, especially outside UK.

Its probably cheaper everywhere than the UK (as everything is!).

I use Paint Shop Pro (V7.04), currently £50 compared to £500 for Photoshop, and find this an excellent piece of software, which is very user friendly with good backup from Digital Workshop (ORF patch required though!!). However, I have never used Photoshop so cannot compare.

What does everybody use? Do you have more than one package to compare?

Finally, whats the price of Photoshop in the US...(Oh no I hear Todd cry!!)

Photoshop runs around $700 in the states for a full version, while PSP 7.0 is about $99.

I've used both, and find that PSP 6.0 is easier to use, but Photoshop seems to be a more capable tool. There also seem to be more people using Photoshop, and therefore more resources available.

Another alternative would be Photoshop Elements 2.0, which is comparable in price to PSP, and has much of the functionality that any of us would actually use in Photoshop. I played with a demo version of it for a bit and it certainly was a capable program, probably as good as PSP.

I've had time to read a few reviews on Elements. It would appear that PSP offers more facilities, in comparison and that Elements is regarded as not being too user friendly, similar in ways to Photoshop. In fact it is suggested only users of Photoshop would understand it properly??? How ironic. Think I 'll stick with PSP.

Although you can bag an ilegal copy of Photoshop 7 (sorry, backup copy)now for £20 on QXL!!

If you don't care about the licence you don't have to spend 20 Pound. You can just download a 30 days trial copy from the Adobe site (also a great way to test it out legally of course) and get a Patch to "prolong" the testing time.

I've used all.....including JASC's "Aftershot" which is a companion piece to PSP and "Microsoft's Picture-It"

PSP and Aftershot are much easier to use; particularly for the an inexperienced computer "image manipulator"

"Picture-It" is the easiest to use

However, to get the "real fine" definition adjustment capability, I've found Photoshop to be more accurate and easier to control. HOWEVER, the steps to acheive an excellent picture can be time consuming, because you get so many choices to try and attributes to "tweak"

If you are interested in "adequate-medium" quality with no hassels-Go to Picture-It or PSP

Good to Better Quality Pictures- PSP AND Aftershot

Better to Great- Photoshop

A word of caution. No matter which program you use, watch your compression ratio when using .jpg's
The more compression, the more loss. If you load and save an image that's already "lossy" you are going to lose even more. Photshop and PSP (in the options window of the save .jpg) give you good control of compression. Obviously, the least compression will lead to large file sizes. Tiff's, which have the least loss, require large file sizes not handled well by Picture-It and slow by PSP